For Neighbors, Being Close Really Counts

By CARIN RUBENSTEIN

Published: September 29, 2002

THE scene could be from an old-fashioned black-and-white vision of a warm and welcoming American neighborhood. Yet it's in living color, happening here in Westchester County, right now.

A dozen neighborhood children play together. Some ride bikes down the gentle slope of the dead-end street in Tappan Landing in Tarrytown. Others take pet birds out of cages and wander off, cockatiels perched on narrow shoulders. Parents barbecue on a grill that has been wheeled out into the street, adding an extra hamburger or two whenever another neighbor shows up for the impromptu outdoor meal.

''We're always saying that we're the luckiest people in the world, because we have each other,'' said Lauren Wendle, 46, one of the burger flippers at Tappan Landing, commenting on the way the people on the block feel about where they live. Ms. Wendle, an associate publisher of a photography magazine in Manhattan, has lived here with her daughters, Katie and Lily, for 13 years, both before and after her divorce seven years ago.

''All my neighbors will always be my friends,'' said Lily Wendle, 12, with the emphatic optimism of the young.

The Wendles and their friendly neighbors have created a microneighborhood for themselves, one that includes every resident of the five houses on their cul de sac: a divorced single mother, three married couples, a gay couple and nine children of various ages. This group of close-knit neighbors are bound together by the proximity of their homes, a common passion for gardening and gossiping, and the loyalty and affection they feel for one another.

In some ways, this intimate enclave is unusual.

Research shows that there has been a decline of community in America, and that neighbors socialized with one another less often in 1998 than they did in 1974, according to Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University and the author of ''Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community'' (Simon & Schuster). In general, Americans' ''connection with their community has dried up over the past 25 or 30 years,'' Dr. Putnam said in an interview.

But despite this finding and a news media-driven obsession with a community in cyberspace, the real people who live next door still matter most, said Barrett Lee, a professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University who has studied neighborhood networks. ''For certain kinds of support, like emergency help and borrowing the proverbial cup of sugar, proximity is most important,'' Mr. Lee said.

Indeed, microneighborhoods like the one in Tappan Landing are blooming in special spots across Westchester County, in densely packed suburban neighborhoods with small homes, in more spacious neighborhoods with larger homes and even in urban apartment complexes. These neighborhood ties still exist because ''we're more likely to be connected to people who live very close to us,'' Dr. Putnam said.

Indeed, the closer people live to one another, the more likely they are to be friends, according to several classic psychological studies conducted in the 1950's. Next-door neighbors were about twice as likely to be friends as those who lived farther away, according to research conducted in a neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass.

Even now, about half of Americans, 47 percent, said they spend a social evening with neighbors at least once a month, in a random national survey of 1,878 Americans conducted in 2000 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. More than half of Americans, 56 percent, said that they have had a meal with some or all of their close neighbors, according to a national survey of 924 American adults conducted in July 2002, according to data provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.

Close members of microneighborhoods do more than just eat together. They trade and share plants and animal traps -- they even weed one another's gardens. They remove barbed-wire fences between their properties and build little pathways, instead, that connect the backyards. They share the cost of an invisible fence, so the dogs can have the run of both properties, in a kind of separate-but-equal canine microneighborhood.

Sharing Holidays and Values

Many such neighbors develop holiday traditions.

In Tappan Landing, children with summer birthdays celebrate in the street with a ''circle cake,'' bought at a local ice cream shop for everyone on the cul de sac to share. There are water balloons and sprinklers for the children, and everyone stays outside until it is too dark to see or until a skunk wanders by, said one of the neighbors, Joanne Fahey, 39.

The Tappan Landing group watches fireworks together on the Fourth of July and they have a pudding party at Christmas, where everyone brings a dessert.

They also tend a joint pumpkin patch, which they harvest in late October, carving 50 pumpkins or so that line the dead-end street on Halloween night. This year, the children put up a sign to name the garden in honor of Pamela Moore, a much-loved former neighbor who died last year.